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Category: law

Universal law predicts how city traffic adapts during extreme flood events

When a 100-year flood hits a city, traffic doesn’t suddenly stop or disappear—it adapts.

“In spite of increasing flood risks, more and more people are moving into flood-prone areas,” said Jianxi Gao, associate professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “This makes it even more urgent to understand how resilient our infrastructure is—and how people adapt when disaster strikes.”

Gao is part of an international team studying how urban transportation systems adapt to like floods. Their work, “Adaptive capacity for multimodal transport network resilience to extreme weather,” published in Nature Sustainability, uses an innovative modeling approach to uncover a universal law governing how travelers shift between and during such disruptions. This law reveals that shifts between transport modes, such as from cars to buses, follow predictable patterns driven by changes in travel demand, the density of transport networks, and how modes either compete or support each other.

Groundbreaking Biological “Artificial Intelligence” System Could Make Impossible Medicines Real

Australian researchers, including those at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney

The University of Sydney is a public research university located in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is consistently ranked among the top universities in the world. The University of Sydney has a strong focus on research and offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate programs across a variety of disciplines, including arts, business, engineering, law, medicine, and science.

Rewriting a scientific law to unlock the potential of energy, sensing and more

A research team from Penn State has broken a 165-year-old law of thermal radiation with unprecedented strength, setting the stage for more efficient energy harvesting, heat transfer and infrared sensing. Their results, currently available online, are slated to be published in Physical Review Letters on June 23.

Breakthrough battery lets physicists reverse entanglement—and rewrite quantum law

Scientists have finally uncovered a quantum counterpart to Carnot’s famed second law, showing that entanglement—once thought stubbornly irreversible—can be shuffled back and forth without loss if you plug in a clever “entanglement battery.”

Quantum equivalent of thermodynamics’ second law discovered for entanglement manipulation

Just over 200 years after French engineer and physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second law of thermodynamics, an international team of researchers has unveiled an analogous law for the quantum world. This second law of entanglement manipulation proves that, just like heat or energy in an idealized thermodynamics regime, entanglement can be reversibly manipulated, a statement which until now had been heavily contested.

Injury to specific brain connections could explain some people’s criminal behavior, study finds

Over the past decades, some lawyers have started using brain imaging scans as evidence during criminal trials, to provide a possible explanation for the criminal behavior of defendants. This was justified by recent neuroscientific studies, which found that some people who commit crimes present differences in specific parts of the brain. Yet a key question remains: are these brain changes causal, compensatory or incidental to the behavior?

To answer this question, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and other institutes in the U.S. analyzed the locations of brain injury temporally associated with a new onset of criminality.

They found evidence suggesting that lesions to a specific white matter tract could be causally implicated in the behavior of individuals who start committing crimes after injury.

Texas law gives grid operator power to disconnect data centers during crisis

The advance warning period is key for this sort of voluntary program, especially one counting on participation from hyperscale data centers with sensitive IT equipment worth billions, Kavulla said.

“This should not be the kind of demand response where you’re calling it with no notice and curtailing the customer straight off,” he said.